![]() ![]() It was a little slow at times and lacked a little in usefulness as well as usability. It ran OK on my Windows 98 box, but, truthfully, it wasn’t quite there. The version of Cartes that went on my Compaq Pentium must have been an early one, likely prior to version 2.0. CdC was not commercial software or even shareware, it was free, given away by its Swiss author, Patrick Chevalley. ![]() He was the first astronomy software guru I’d run into, and I figured if he thought the program was worth a look, it was worth a look. Probably it was my late friend Jeff Medkeff. I’m not sure who first told me about Cartes du Ciel. For those reasons, I was still clinging to that hoary DOS (what came before Windows, younguns) application, SkyGlobe. There wasn’t much in the way of animation, planetary simulations, or even horizons. It was more a computerized atlas than it was a simulacrum of the sky. Megastar was a fantastic program, throwing up the deepest charts I had ever seen, but it was weak on the sky simulation part of the planetarium equation. My favorite was Emil Bonanno’s famous (still) Megastar. I was experimenting with an early “planning” type program, Deepsky, but mostly I was using planetariums, programs whose whole raison d’être is to display a simulation of the night sky on your PC screen. Me and Cartes go a long ways back, back to the late 1990s. I intend to give you the straight poop on Stellarium real soon, but for now let’s focus on everybody’s fave freeware, Cartes du Ciel, “Sky Charts.” ![]() It’s way different from other astro gear where “more expensive” usually equals “more better.” Price doesn’t always have much to do with how well an astro-program works or looks, as is amply demonstrated by Cartes du Ciel (CdC) and Stellarium. Astronomy software is strange and confusing. ![]()
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